Has anyone every solved the "Complete Albums selected at random" issue?

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Level 5

5,591 points

Has anyone every solved the "Complete Albums selected at random" issue?

Smart Playlists nearly work for the situation where you want to maintain a playlist of randomly selected albums within a memory limitation. Having first selected Controls > Shuffle > By Albums I can create a Smart Playlist with the following parameters:

with the intent of syncing a random selection from an Unplayed Music playlist with my "16Gb" iPod Nano. Unfortunately, the memory limit overrides the "By Album" setting in that I end up with (typically) one or two albums in the smart playlist (and therefore on the iPod) that are incomplete. For example, using the playlist definition above and updated, I see this:

i.e., the playlist has only selected the first 5 tracks of a 15-track album.

I'll admit that this is in the "minor annoyance" category ... but it is still annoying when I see something on my iPod that I want to listen to yet discover that there are missing tracks.

Anyone found a solution or work-around to this?

Posted on Jul 12, 2014 8:39 AM

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Answer 1

ed2345

Level 9

62,486 points

Jul 12, 2014 8:50 AM in response to hhgttg27

it is still annoying when I see something on my iPod that I want to listen to yet discover that there are missing tracks.

Anyone found a solution or work-around to this?

I understand the annoyance, but you really can't depend on anything with the word "random" to give you exactly what you want! To hear a certain album, make sure it is synced in toto to your iPod.

I am sure it would be technically possible to have the "By Album" setting override the size setting, i.e. to disallow splitting albums when doing the autofill. Feel free to suggest it to Apple at the iTunes Feedback page.

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Answer 2

hhgttg27 Author

Level 5

5,591 points

Jul 12, 2014 9:06 AM in response to ed2345

Agreed that "random" selection is a dangerous topic 😁 ... however, where there is a capability that does randomly select albums it seems reasonable (to me, at least) that it should exclude the case where only a subset of the album is included in the selection. The common scenario for me is setting up my iPod for a trip, usually involving many tedious hours at airports, in airplanes and/or driving - obviously I could carefully select the music that I really want to have available but at times its nice (or far less time-consuming) to have iTunes do it for me. Typically I have the iPod set up to sync to four playlists - 3 manual (music, audiobooks, radio plays), and one for randomly selected albums as described above. The irritation is that the Smart Playlist method so nearly works exactly as I want it to!

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Answer 3

ed2345

Level 9

62,486 points

Jul 13, 2014 4:11 AM in response to hhgttg27

Typically I have the iPod set up to sync to four playlists - 3 manual (music, audiobooks, radio plays), and one for randomly selected albums as described above.

The issue, of course, is that the Smart Playlist logic in iTunes does not "randomly select albums." It selects songs "by album." As you have correctly noted, that is not really what you would prefer. I do not know of away to get different behavior, short of using a Regular Playlist and manually choosing what you want.

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